alt Hacker NewsBut Western consumers at large won't buy Chinese devices if they don't carry the Play Store. And many Western app developers won't want to deal with Google Play Services and it's APIs missing, which is what made porting to Amazon's Android fork annoying as fuck.
That's the huge, huge carrot that Google carries in front of everyone thinking to fork Android.
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They don't want to deal with Google Play Services missing because it's pretty rare to have a mainstream phone without it, as soon as the Chinese manufacturers pump out millions of devices without it in the western market all at once, the developers will have to follow.
Google does have a card to play here, I don't disagree but they shouldn't overstate their hand either. The Google bits of Android are good enough to keep open-source ROMs and small manufacturers away but they aren't a silver bullet and won't save them if China stops playing the game.
Right, so the userbase is the true moat. Same stories as anything social.